What began as a guy trying to decorate a wall in his garage evolved into the drag racing collectibles industry.

"I kept hounding this movie-poster dealer for one from Drag Strip Girl," says Mike Goyda, who, in the 18 years since, has become the preeminent purveyor of drag racing memorabilia in the world. "That poster cost me so little, it was amazing – I'm talking $10 or $20. Guys would come by to see the cars in my garage and end up asking me if I could find them a poster, and it just took off from there. I started getting calls from people all over the country. When I got started in all this, there was no real established market; nobody was really dealing in this kind of memorabilia."

Today, Goyda's inventory consists of between 75,000 and 100,000 items. If you can imagine it, he probably has it.

What began as a guy trying to decorate a wall in his garage evolved into the drag racing collectibles industry.

"I kept hounding this movie-poster dealer for one from Drag Strip Girl," says Mike Goyda, who, in the 18 years since, has become the preeminent purveyor of drag racing memorabilia in the world. "That poster cost me so little, it was amazing – I'm talking $10 or $20. Guys would come by to see the cars in my garage and end up asking me if I could find them a poster, and it just took off from there. I started getting calls from people all over the country. When I got started in all this, there was no real established market; nobody was really dealing in this kind of memorabilia."

Today, Goyda's inventory consists of between 75,000 and 100,000 items. If you can imagine it, he probably has it.

"If everybody kept everything, none of it would have any value," he says. "But they don't. Most racers either kept everything or kept nothing – usually nothing – and nobody has any idea what their stuff is actually worth. To them, it's just a bunch of stuff in a box in their attic. But if they happened to hang onto something valuable all this time, by accident or by design, I'll pay dearly for it. I'm not one of these guys who comes in and buys stuff by the pound. I go through everything they have, determine the value of it all, and pay them 60 to 85 percent of what I think I'll be able to get for it. People are blown away, but that's how I operate. It takes years to build a reputation but only one bad deal to screw it up. I've had people think they're going to get $300 for what they have – tell me that that's what they expect to get – and I'll hand them a check for $4,200. I had someone who thought what he had was worth maybe $1,000. He was going to donate it to a museum. I gave him $8,675."

Goyda's own personal collection includes priceless, one-of-a-kind items such as the Deist firesuit Bonnie Bedelia wore in the movie of Shirley Muldowney's life, Heart Like a Wheel; the cowl off the 1975 Jade Grenade Top Fuel crash at New England Dragway that driver Don Roberts was lucky to survive; a pair of mag wheels from one of "Jungle Jim" Liberman's '69 Nova Funny Cars; the entire Chrondek timing system from the first five Bakersfield March Meet events in the late '50s and early '60s; jackets from original Division Directors Dale Ham and Buster Couch; the four-foot-tall trophy that Dave Strickler won at what may have been the first true Funny Car race ever, a special event for A/FX cars held in conjunction with the 1965 NHRA Springnationals in Bristol; an injector scoop from the Winged Express driven by "Wild Willie" Borsch that didn't work and was immediately thrown on the ground by his partner, Mousie Marcellus; even an early Deist firesuit worn by "Big Daddy" Don Garlits himself.

There's more – lots more. "In my personal collection, I have everything you could imagine," Goyda says. With a couple hundred items on his garage walls, there's no more room for anything new. "If I find something tomorrow that I absolutely have to have, then something else has to come down off the wall. My weaknesses are jackets and crew shirts. I just got a 'Jungle Jim' crew shirt, the one with the vine going across it, that's probably the best thing I've picked up in a long time."

Goyda, 64, didn't just happen to get into drag racing memorabilia. He was the perfect person to take this to the next level, an antique dealer all his life. "Six months into this whole thing, back in 1992, I decided that this is what I was going to do full-time," he says. "I did a few shows a year until 1995 to get rid of my inventory and walked away from the antiques business entirely. When I was getting started in this, I knew nothing of the values. The first four or five years were brutal because there was no market for this stuff. Then I got a Website (goyda.com) in 2000, and it changed everything. The biggest thing that allows me to make a living at this is that I have such an extensive inventory. Type 'drag racing memorabilia' into Google, and I'm up at the top."

Goyda deals with people from not just all over the country but all over the world. The guy two doors down from his home in Lancaster, Pa., probably isn't looking for that one special decal he loved back in the 1960s and wishes he still had. "A lot of it goes to Japan," he says. "I probably sell more stuff to people there than anywhere except the U.S. They love our culture. With them, it's more hot rod stuff than drag racing stuff. In this country, most of the people I sell stuff to are from the East or West Coast."

Goyda deals in every area of memorabilia – handout photos, car-club jackets, team jackets, pins, posters, and magazines. "There are people who collect nothing but pins and nothing but jackets," he says. "A lot of what I have sells for only $4 or $5. The more expensive items sell slower, of course. There are just a lot fewer people who want to spend that kind of money, and some things never find a home."

 That's OK, though. Goyda wouldn't have it if he didn't personally like it.

"It was the same thing when I collected antiques – if I like it, the value or the rarity has nothing to do it," he says. "I don't collect anything that I can't pick up and touch. I'm constantly refining my collection, and some things I have probably are of no particular value to anyone else; I just like them. But what generally is worth the most are the more difficult-to-find things. Over the years, I've gotten probably 20 calls from guys around here who were at York, Pa., the night the 'Green Monster' blew up. They've got a piece of it, and they think it's worth a lot of money. The problem is, a lot of other people grabbed a piece of it, too.

"My favorite jacket of all the ones I've ever owned is a Lion's Drag Strip jacket made for Tommy Ivo. Everybody who ran 150 mph there got a jacket, then they did the same thing when guys started hitting 160, 170, and 180. Ivo just missed getting a 150 jacket and a 160 jacket. When they broke 170, he was running 169 and change, and he lamented to [track manager] Mickey Thompson that if he didn't get busy, he was going to miss out that one, too. The following Sunday, Mickey called Tommy down to the starting line and presented him with an 'Almost 170 MPH' jacket. It's unique, the only one that exists." (That afternoon, Ivo cracked 170.)

If you have something you want Goyda to buy, it had better not be from the past few years. Even the 1990s aren't the good ol' days. "For the later stuff, there's no market," he says. "The guys who'll eventually want it aren't old enough to care now. Thirty years from now, they will. What I sell are memories – it's as simple as that. There's a connection between what I have and what's in their heads, and having something they can hold in their hands brings it all back."